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Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions

reuters.com

31–40 of 125 posts

Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions

#31

I just took a 30 second look at the English language websites of TASS, RT and Sputnik. Unsurprisingly, there is no mention whatsoever of these protests.

These websites are controlled (directly or indirectly) by the Russian government. They usually don't mention opposition meetings. I think that they don't want anyone to know even about their existence.

Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions

#32
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"So you're trying to analyze this as if a foreign country tries to cut Russia off from the internet." Well, Russia has been threatened to be cut off from SWIFT. At about the same time several Russian banks has been cut off from VISA and MC and after that Russia has built nation payment processing and forced VISA and MC use it for intra-Russia payments. Being cut off from the internet is more far fetched but given the…

> Russia has been threatened to be cut off from SWIFT Do you have a link for this claim? All I get when googling "russia cut off from swift" is a bunch of rt/zerohedge/tass stuff (wtf is TruNews?), followed by some clear denials in ft/bloomberg. Is there more to this than just the Russian government saying stuff?

A quick google search reveals they apparently have their own SWIFT now.¹ It is ran side by side with SWIFT, not as a competitor, so the claim that it is from fear of sanctions or other actions from the US seems accurate.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/23/russias-central-bank-governo...

Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions

#33

Russian here. I live in Moscow. I've just came back from the rally. Interned at an IT company in Switzerland and US. My Digital Ocean VPS IP address was blocked in Russia due to this crazy thing going on with the Internet here. Even though it was a private service that is not exposed to the global network. AMA.

So what exactly are they doing? Just cutting off random IPs? The actual IP was blocked or is it only DNS based? How about tor traffic?

Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions

#34
post #29
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You overestimate tech literacy of the majority of Russian population. Very small percentage is engaged with playing videogames or knows how to use torrents. People are given lots of distractions though - so many controversial, absolutely absurd laws have been introduced in the past few years everybody talks about (about fighting homosexual propaganda, forbidding adoption for foreigners, blasphemy laws and so on). Int…

The real power in Russia is within two cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg. It's the urban and relatively highly educated population in these two cities that decides the fate of Russia, not the majority.

I might be pessimistic because I am in close contact with that demographic (lots of my friends are young, educated, comparatively well-off guys from Moscow working in tech) and, pardon my French, they decide shit. Oligarchs decide the fate of Russia.

Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions

#35

>The protests in Moscow, the southern city of Voronezh and Khabarovsk in the far east had all been officially authorized. How subversive.

I don't know where you live, but is it not the same (i.e. you need official approbation to plan a protest) in most countries?

Yes. Except that in Russia this works a little bit different. You need a permission (not approbation) from the authorities for any political gatherings. Otherwise, everyone gathering risks spending 15 days in jail (or $500 fines, median monthly salary after tax $300) for gathering illegally. Usually they forbid them, so that was an exception.

Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions

#36
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Russia has been threatened to be cut off from SWIFT Do you have a link for this claim? All I get when googling "russia cut off from swift" is a bunch of rt/zerohedge/tass stuff (wtf is TruNews?), followed by some clear denials in ft/bloomberg. Is there more to this than just the Russian government saying stuff?

I most certainly do. 13. Recalls that the restrictive measures taken by the EU are directly linked to the Russian Federation’s violation of international law with the illegal annexation of Crimea and the destabilisation of Ukraine, while the trade measures taken by the Russian Federation, including those against Ukraine and other Eastern Partnership countries which have recently concluded Association Agreements with…

Was this seriously considered, or is it just the European Parliament saying things? When I google this stuff, I can't find anything to support it like an actual plan or something.

Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions

#38

Russian here. I live in Moscow. I've just came back from the rally. Interned at an IT company in Switzerland and US. My Digital Ocean VPS IP address was blocked in Russia due to this crazy thing going on with the Internet here. Even though it was a private service that is not exposed to the global network. AMA.

What kind of internet regulation would you tolerate? What are your thoughts about current situation in Russia where literally millions of our citizens wholeheartedly agree with any crazy internet policy? And in general believe in what is told though TV

Yeah, i live here too.

Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions

#39
post #33

Russian here. I live in Moscow. I've just came back from the rally. Interned at an IT company in Switzerland and US. My Digital Ocean VPS IP address was blocked in Russia due to this crazy thing going on with the Internet here. Even though it was a private service that is not exposed to the global network. AMA.

So what exactly are they doing? Just cutting off random IPs? The actual IP was blocked or is it only DNS based? How about tor traffic?

Right now, we have a legislation (this one existed since 2012) that requires to ban certain IP addresses. All ISP's are being monitored by the authority called Roscomnadzor and allowing access to a banned IP will lead to fines. Unfortunately, this doesn't really work because people here learned how to use VPN's, proxies and Tor. Moreover, with cloud providers you can easily switch IP addresses. Telegram messenger was banned here but it still works. I guess that they frequently change IP addresses and use multiple cloud providers. When Roscomnadzor tried to ban the messenger, they added significant number of IP subnetworks (I think that the largest blocked subnet was 52.192.0.0/11 used by AWS). This lead to all sorts of different problems because it turned out that some banks and large companies were paralysed for months as their websites were blocked.

After a year of of trying to block the messenger, they just decided to pass this law. All ISPs that handle inter-counties exchange must install a government backdoor that could shut down all outgoing and incoming connections outside from Russia.

Also, some websites now are blocked by their DNS record, not by their IP. This lead to other problems. Imagine there was a website X that was blocked in Russia. The X company decides to change the domain and abandon X. Now, someone else buys the banned domain and adds any IP addresses to the DNS (like, government authorities websites). Whoala! These websites are banned in Russia as well. This happened multiple times and lead to Google, YouTube and other websites being inaccessible here.

The legislation proposes a separate national DNS system that differs from the ICANN one. Similarly to how North Korea does this in their country. This way no-one could buy an abandoned blocked website and add a bunch of valuable and valid IPs there.

They claim that this will increase the stability of the Russian Internet. People in our government believe that the Internet was designed in the US to control the world. They also believe that they could shut down the Internet in any country at this point of time. They say that this has already happened in Syria once and we need to prepare for this.

They don't actually explain that the thing that happened to Syria was possible only because they had a single ISP. And their centralised system was hacked.

I believe that if we decide to install a backdoor to all of our ISPs, then someone else from the outside could pull the switch.

Re: Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions

#40

> It seeks to route Russian web traffic and data through points controlled by the state and proposes building a national Domain Name System to allow the internet to continue functioning even if the country is cut off from foreign infrastructure. The first part just seems like a forced MITM situation whilst the second makes some sense - in a cyber warfare scenario; however, that runs under the assumption that the DNS…

> The first part just seems like a forced MITM situation whilst the second makes some sense - in a cyber warfare scenario; however, that runs under the assumption that the DNS servers and/or entries didn't get poisoned before they're "cut-off" from foreign infrastructure.

Not only that, you don't need a separate DNS for this. Presumably the .ru TLD is already controlled by Russia. All they would need is to operate their own root server, which wouldn't even need to return invalid data for other TLDs, just not return invalid data for the .ru TLD.

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